Wolfgang Stroebe

Introduction

Wolfgang Stroebe (born 5 May 1941) is a German social psychologist and emeritus professor at Utrecht University, where he spent the most productive two decades of his career, and visiting professor at the University of Groningen. He is one of the few European social psychologists whose work has become foundational in three quite separate literatures: the health consequences of bereavement, the failure of self-regulation in eating, and the productivity losses that afflict idea-generating groups.

The bereavement work, much of it done with his wife Margaret Stroebe, overturned the long-standing assumption that grief must be "worked through." The eating work produced the goal conflict model, which explains why dieting fails in environments where palatable food is everywhere. The group work, with Michael Diehl, solved what had been a genuine puzzle — why people brainstorming together generate fewer ideas than the same people working alone. In the last fifteen years Stroebe has become, in addition, one of the most sophisticated critics of the way psychology has talked about its own replication crisis.

Early Life and Education

Stroebe was born in Pforzheim, Germany. He took his MA in psychology at the University of Tübingen in 1964 and completed a doctorate at the University of Münster in 1966 with a thesis on the size-weight illusion, a problem in psychophysics.

He then did something unusual: a second doctorate, at the London School of Economics, awarded in 1968 for a thesis on social judgment. The move from psychophysics to social judgment marked his turn to the questions that would occupy him for the rest of his career. With J. Richard Eiser he published Categorization and Social Judgment in 1972, an early statement of the idea that social judgment is an act of categorisation rather than a passive registration of information.

Academic and Professional Career

Stroebe began in the United States as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1968. He returned to England for a postdoctoral fellowship at Bristol (1970–71) and a lectureship at Sussex, then spent a year as a visiting associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

In 1973 he was appointed professor at the University of Marburg, and in 1979 he moved to the University of Tübingen, his alma mater, where he chaired the psychology department from 1980 to 1987 and was dean of the faculty of social sciences in 1991–92. From 1981 to 1983 he was president of the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology, the body that for a period represented the methodological conscience of European social psychology.

In 1992 he moved to Utrecht University as professor of social and organizational psychology, chairing the department from 1992 to 1995 and serving as founding scientific director of the Dutch national Research Institute "Psychology & Health" from 2000 to 2005. He was honorary professor at Utrecht from 2006 to 2011, emeritus since 2011, and visiting professor at Groningen from 2011. For twenty-five years he co-edited the European Review of Social Psychology, and with Miles Hewstone he co-edits the standard European social psychology textbook.

His honours include an honorary doctorate from the University of Louvain (2002), the Tajfel Lifetime Achievement Award of the European Association of Social Psychology (2005), the lifetime achievement award of the German Psychological Association (2010), election to the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2014), and a knighthood in the Order of the Netherlands Lion (2006).

Major Contributions to Psychology

Productivity loss in brainstorming groups

The puzzle Stroebe and Michael Diehl addressed in 1987 was well known and unexplained: group brainstorming, despite being the most widely used idea-generation technique in organizations, reliably produces fewer and less original ideas than the same number of people working alone and then pooling their output. Their answer, developed over a series of studies, was that the loss is a process loss rather than a motivational one, and that the largest single component is production blocking — in a group, only one person can speak at a time, so members spend much of the session waiting, forgetting ideas, and losing the thread. Later work with Bernard Nijstad extended this into a general cognitive model of idea generation in groups.

Bereavement and health

With Margaret Stroebe, he conducted the large-scale studies that established bereavement as a genuine health risk rather than merely a psychological state. Bereavement and Health: The Psychological and Physical Consequences of Partner Loss (1987), and a 2007 review in The Lancet, documented elevated mortality, morbidity, and health-service use among the widowed, and identified the mechanisms — including the loss of a daily regulatory partner and the physiological consequences of chronic stress.

More consequential was their challenge to the "grief work" hypothesis: the assumption, inherited from Freud and embedded in clinical practice, that healthy adjustment requires confronting and processing the loss. Reviewing the evidence, they found little support for it, and showed that avoidance and oscillation can be adaptive. With Henk Schut, Margaret Stroebe developed the dual process model of coping with bereavement, in which the bereaved oscillate between loss-oriented coping — confrontating the loss directly — and restoration-oriented coping — taking on the new tasks and roles that the loss creates. The model replaced the older stage theories and is now the dominant framework in the field.

The goal conflict model of eating

Stroebe's account of why diets fail starts from a simple observation: in food-rich environments people hold two goals that cannot be satisfied at once. The goal of enjoying palatable food and the goal of controlling weight are in chronic conflict, and because the hedonic response to food is immediate while the benefits of restraint are delayed and abstract, the enjoyment goal tends to win at the moment of choice unless it is actively inhibited. Restrained eaters, on this account, do not fail because of a psychological defect; they fail because they are trying to maintain an inhibition indefinitely against a rewarding stimulus that is always present. The model is set out in Dieting, Overweight and Obesity: Self-Regulation in a Food-Rich Environment (2008; 2nd ed. 2022).

Judgment, attitudes, and advertising

Across his career Stroebe has maintained a second programme on attitudes, persuasion, and social judgment, culminating in The Psychology of Advertising with Bob Fennis, which applies social psychological theory to how commercial persuasion actually works. Earlier, with Bruno Frey, he examined the tension between self-interest and collective action in public goods, showing how economic and psychological accounts of free-riding diverge.

History and method

In his later career Stroebe has turned to the foundations of his own discipline. In 2012 he published an examination of Norman Triplett's 1898 study of cyclists — conventionally the founding experiment of social psychology — showing that its data do not support the conclusions drawn from them and that the field has continued to cite it regardless. He has also written extensively, and critically, about the replication crisis, arguing in a much-cited 2014 paper with Fritz Strack that exact replication is close to impossible in principle and in a 2016 paper that estimates of false-positive rates in the social psychology literature have been substantially overstated.

Major Publications

Eiser, J. R. & Stroebe, W. (1972). Categorization and Social Judgment. London: Academic Press.
Stroebe, W. & Frey, B. S. (1982). "Self-interest and collective action: The economics and psychology of public goods." British Journal of Social Psychology, 21(2), 121–137.
Stroebe, W. & Stroebe, M. S. (1987). Bereavement and Health: The Psychological and Physical Consequences of Partner Loss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Diehl, M. & Stroebe, W. (1987). "Productivity loss in brainstorming groups: Toward the solution of a riddle." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(3), 497–509.
Stroebe, W. (2008). Dieting, Overweight and Obesity: Self-Regulation in a Food-Rich Environment. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. (2nd ed. 2022, Routledge.)
Stroebe, W. (2012). "The truth about Triplett (1898), but nobody seems to care." Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(1), 54–57.
Stroebe, W. & Strack, F. (2014). "The alleged crisis and the illusion of exact replication." Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9(1), 59–71.
Fennis, B. M. & Stroebe, W. (2021). The Psychology of Advertising (3rd ed.). London: Routledge.

Impact and Legacy

Stroebe's contribution to bereavement research is the clearest case of psychology changing practice. The dual process model displaced stage theories in much of the clinical world, and the finding that grief does not have to be worked through — that avoidance is not pathology — has altered how counsellors and clinicians respond to the bereaved. The demonstration that brainstorming as usually practised does not work, and that production blocking is why, is one of the few findings in group research that has been directly applied.

His positions on method and replication are more contested and are the part of his legacy most likely to be debated.

His critique of the replication crisis cuts both ways. Stroebe and Strack's argument — that no study can be exactly replicated because the conditions that matter are never fully specifiable, and that replication failures therefore cannot straightforwardly be read as evidence that the original finding was false — identifies a real methodological problem. It also risks making findings unfalsifiable: if any failure to replicate can be attributed to an unknown moderator in an unknown context, then no amount of failed replication can ever count against a claim. Replication researchers including Brian Nosek and Eric-Jan Wagenmakers have made exactly this objection, and the exchange remains unresolved. Stroebe's 2016 estimate that the false-positive rate in social psychology is far lower than the widely cited figures was itself received sceptically by researchers using different estimation methods.

The dual process model is harder to test than it is to accept. The model's central prediction — that the bereaved oscillate between loss- and restoration-oriented demands — fits clinical experience well, but oscillation is difficult to operationalise, and critics have noted that the framework is broad enough to accommodate almost any pattern of coping, which makes it hard to specify in advance what would disconfirm it.

The goal conflict model underplays biology. Its account of dieting failure is persuasive as a description of the choice environment, but it gives relatively little weight to the homeostatic and neuroendocrine regulation of body weight that makes sustained weight loss physiologically difficult independent of goal conflict. Structured programmes with continuing contact — the Diabetes Prevention Program and Look AHEAD among them — do produce meaningful maintenance for a substantial minority, which the model does not obviously predict.

His later work on firearms is unavoidably political. Stroebe has published critical reviews of firearm possession and violent death. Whatever the merits of the individual analyses — and the evidence base is observational, since gun ownership cannot be randomly assigned — the topic is among the most contested in American social science, and his conclusions have been disputed by researchers on both sides of the policy debate.

The Triplett finding is uncomfortable and largely ignored. Having demonstrated that the canonical founding study of social psychology does not support what it is cited for, Stroebe noted in his title that "nobody seems to care." The paper is a test of whether a field will correct its own origin story, and so far the answer appears to be that it will not.

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References

Stroebe, W., & Stroebe, M. S. (1987). Bereavement and Health. Cambridge University Press.